MAI Blog

With the newly reoriented direction of Manu Park, the NJP Art Center will seek to strengthen its role to develop initiatives to revitalize Paik’s artistic legacy. As a first step in doing so this year, the NJP Art Center is delighted to present a new exhibition “Mediascape, à pas de Nam June Paik.” This exhibition picks up on the notion of ‘mediascape,’ which was put forward by scholars such as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1990) and art historian David Joselit (2005).

In the two-storey space of the NJP Art Center, the works of Nam June Paik and other artists will be mingled together. The whole space will be made to constitute a kind of seamless mediascape where visitors play its ‘topography’ out in a bodily manner, and thus the Paikian way of living in the mediascape can come out in performative and revelatory ways. Additionally, we will also use the façade of the Seoul Square building, located across from the Seoul Station, as part of our exhibition space, which was realized in cooperation with Gana Mplanet. One of Paik’s “Suite 212” video series will be projected every night onto the huge screen, soaring 256 feet high and stretching 325 feet wide, which consists of 42,000 LEDs, so that the two physically distant sites are connected within this exhibition’s mediascape. The exhibition is an effort to pave the way for a new prospect to lay open the embedded but hitherto veiled layers of the Paikian mediascape.